TITLE:
An Innovative Approach for Attribute Reduction in Rough Set Theory
AUTHORS:
Alex Sandro Aguiar Pessoa, Stephan Stephany
KEYWORDS:
Rough Set Theory, Reducts, Attribute Reduction, Metaheuristics
JOURNAL NAME:
Intelligent Information Management,
Vol.6 No.5,
August
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: The Rough Sets
Theory is used in data mining with emphasis on the treatment of uncertain or vague
information. In the case of classification, this theory implicitly calculates
reducts of the full set of attributes, eliminating those that are redundant or
meaningless. Such reducts may even serve as input to other classifiers other
than Rough Sets. The typical high dimensionality of current databases precludes
the use of greedy methods to find optimal or suboptimal reducts in the search
space and requires the use of stochastic methods. In this context, the
calculation of reducts is typically performed by a genetic algorithm, but other
metaheuristics have been proposed with better performance. This work proposes
the innovative use of two known metaheuristics for this calculation, the
Variable Neighborhood Search, the Variable Neighborhood Descent, besides a
third heuristic called Decrescent Cardinality Search. The last one is a new
heuristic specifically proposed for reduct calculation. Considering some
databases commonly found in the literature of the area, the reducts that have been obtained present lower cardinality, i.e., a lower number of attributes.